Looking for advice on what cable connector to use

I have a bunch of sensors on one end and a long distance till my Arduino. These sensors are prone to break often so I want to be able to make them "plug and play"-ish so that no soldering is required (I won't be maintaining this particular install).

So I basically need connectors that fit these requirements (or at least most of them):

  • Be easy to install (soldering is OK, but I'd rather not have to buy a cripmer)
  • Don't need to be particularly durable; if they last 20 uses that's fine.
  • Be Veroboard friendly as I will be prototyping with that.
  • Big plus if they can be bought at Sparkfun as I have a big order that I need to make soon.
  • Big plus if they are cheap!

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Why not use screw terminals?

Hey Crossroads, thanks for the answer.

I am currently using screw terminals (though the blue ones) :slight_smile:
The only problem with these is that the sensors need to either have a very long cable that reaches the terminals, or I need to have a little piece of Veroboard with a screw terminal next to each sensor and then run a long cable to my Arduino. I didn't mention this on my original post but the sensors are a few feet away from each other.

My ideal setup would be to have something like this, where a hyphen represents "cable":

SENSOR-----(male conn) (female conn)------------------l---o----n---g--------c----a---b---l----e----(female conn) (male conn on Veroboard)

This way, the sensor replacements just have a small cable and a female connector and are easier to manage than having to deal with a long cable attached to them. Also I can make several of these: (female conn)------------------l---o----n---g--------c----a---b---l----e----(female conn) and swap them around if needed. I think the nice advantage of this is that it separates my project intro three parts: the sensors, the cables, and the vero+Arduino.

This is what I think is ideal for this project, but am I also not familiar with what's out there so I'm open to suggestions that will help me improve this setup.

Just need male 0.1" pins and female pins that can slide onto them?

How about pre-crimped wires

and housings that hold 2-3-4 pins (you haven't said how many pins per sensor)

Different lengths, colors, housings are available.
male-male cable into female headers works well also.

Yes, these would work very well. Thank you!

here is the golden solution:

13thWarrior:
here is the golden solution:

Phone connector (audio) - Wikipedia

13thWarrior, I have a lot of experience with these since I've wired all my recording studio myself a few years ago. I remember soldering a few hundred of these in just a weekend; TS, TRS, TRRS, you name it. They'd work really well except they are very expensive when compared to crimp pins. The latter are around $8 for the lot of 100 (for male pins).

I appreciate the suggestion, though!